Boy in a Cape and Turban (Portrait of Prince Rupert of the Palatinate)

Boy in a Cape and Turban (Portrait of Prince Rupert of the Palatinate)

Boy in a Cape and Turban (Portrait of Prince Rupert of the Palatinate)

Rupert’s averted glance is seen in many of Lievens’s portraits, including his Self-Portrait of ca. 1631–32 (JL-105). Lievens, with few exceptions, tended to make his sitters and figures seem aloof, detached, or reflective, and in this portrait he used the sideways glance to give the prince an air of thoughtful authority. See Lloyd DeWitt, “Evolution and Ambition in the Career of Jan Lievens (1607–1674)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 2006), 76.

Christopher Brown identified the boy in the Rembrandt workshop portrait as Prince Rupert based on an eighteenth-century description and the provenance. Ernst van de Wetering in Ernst van de Wetering and Bernhard Schnackenburg, eds., The Mystery of the Young Rembrandt (Exh. cat. Kassel, Museumslandschaft Hessen; Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis) (Wolfratshausen, 2001), 326–31.

The characterization of the wood is based on Peter Klein’s two dendrochronology reports. One states a dating could not be obtained; the other suggests an earliest fell date of 1617, a more plausible fell date of 1621…1623…1627 + x, and a plausible first use date from 1625 onward.